"A terrestrial economy relaunched by a shared project and a demographics that rebounds."
Replying to @ThomasAlxDmy
Translated from French
A month ago, on the heels of SpaceX's IPO, I published an analysis explaining why this company would be worth 30 to 50 trillion dollars within five years. Thirty million views, and quite a few people telling me I'd lost my mind. Elon had RT'd me.
Yesterday, Elon Musk wrote that SpaceX will be worth more than the rest of Earth if its goals are achieved. "More than the rest of Earth." Everyone saw it as a provocation. I see it as a theorem. Let me demonstrate it.
Let's pose the problem. Total global wealth, everything eight billion humans own—real estate, stocks, factories, gold—weighs in at about 500 trillion dollars. Saying one company will be worth more than all that combined seems arithmetically absurd. And it is. In a closed system. Musk's phrase says just one thing, and it's the most important of the century: the system is opening up.
Let's grant the degrowthers their one valid point: infinite growth is impossible in a finite world. Their error isn't logical; it's geographical. They thought the world ended at Earth. But Earth represents 0.0003% of the solar system's mass and intercepts one half-billionth of the Sun's energy. We're squabbling over crumbs at the foot of a buffet no one's opened yet. Open it, and hypergrowth stops being a slogan and becomes a physical trajectory again.
A. For ten thousand years, wealth has followed a single variable: the amount of energy and matter that humans know how to capture and organize. Fire, agriculture, coal, oil, atom, silicon. Every leap of civilization is an energy leap. Our entire civilization runs on 20 terawatts. The Sun radiates twenty thousand billion times more, continuously, for free, for four and a half billion years. On the Kardashev scale, we're a Type 0.7 civilization. The Sun alone takes us to Type II.
B. SpaceX isn't participating in this transition. SpaceX owns the only door to it. Starship divides the cost of orbit by a hundred, the constellation handles communications, and the world's second player is ten years behind. I've already listed what that unlocks: orbital data centers, factories in microgravity, asteroid mining, Mars. What interests me today is the stage no one prices: what it unlocks in people's heads.
Because here's what demographers refuse to see. Western birth rates aren't collapsing because of housing prices. Our great-grandparents had six kids in unheated homes. It's collapsing because we've confiscated the future. You don't have kids for a world we're told is ending. You have them for a world that's beginning. The Western birth rate peak coincides exactly with the peak of technological optimism: jets, the atom, Apollo. Girard understood it: a civilization deprived of a frontier turns its rivalry inward, and that's precisely our era—culture wars, resentment, decline managed by committees. Give it back a frontier, and that same mimetic energy becomes emulation, construction, transmission. The colonization of the cosmos is the first project capable of unifying the West since 1969. We'll have kids again like we laid cathedral stones, for a structure we won't see completed. The first baby born in orbit will do more for European demographics than fifty years of family policies.
Now, add it up. A terrestrial economy relaunched by a shared project and a demographics that rebounds. A complete orbital economy—energy, computing, industry, tourism—where every dollar passes through the same tollbooth. A solar system whose matter and energy exceed everything Earth will ever hold. And one single company that controls access.
If A, wealth follows captured energy, and if B, SpaceX alone opens a reservoir a billion times greater, then the conclusion follows on its own: comparing SpaceX to terrestrial wealth is a category error. Earth stops being the denominator. "More than the rest of Earth" isn't hyperbole. It's rounding down.
No one, in front of the first oil well in 1859, sketched Dubai. No one, in front of the first transistor, imagined computing would become the world's top industry. We're in 1859, and the well has just gushed.
I stand by what I wrote a month ago: buy optimism. I'm changing just one detail. The size of the underlying asset. It's the universe.